The number one goal in the Presidential election of 2012 for every conservative, moderate, independent, Republican, Tea Party, and patriot should be the defeat of President Obama and his radical liberal progressive agenda. And as an incumbent nominated by one of our two major parties who is going to raise over a billion dollars and has spent his entire presidency creating dependencies and voting blocs dependent on him and who is going to run the most negative campaign in history, it is not going to be very easy to defeat Barack Obama, regardless of what the economy is like or how bad he has protected our citizens life, liberty, and property.
So to me, rather than dreaming of pies in the sky and putting my bets on unicorns and leprechauns and supporting GOP candidates who are all hopey and changey, I'm looking at the polls and doing the math and figuring out how to best beat this guy, and supporting the candidate who does that the best.
Remember, a Republican Congress dominated by real conservatives and Tea Party views can drive the agenda, passing legislation, cutting deficits, and putting in place the changes our nation needs. If the GOP puts the right person at the top of the ticket, the GOP may be able to slightly grow its majority in the House, which they already control by a wide margin, and take back control of the Senate, perhaps even getting a filibuster proof majority if Obama is wiped out by the right GOP candidate at the top of the ticket.
With this sort of reasoning, I put a lot of stock in guys like Jay Cost or Nate Silver and sites like FiveThirtyEight because they run the math and look at the numbers and factor in the power of polls and demographics to predict elections accurately. Here then for your consideration are some of the highlights from a good column that Nate Silver just wrote for the New York Times called Is Obama Toast? Handicapping the 2012 Election:
...Instead we should think big, and focus on the three fundamentals...The article goes on to project the results of 4 different scenario's in great detail. Here is a quick summary of the results of those 4 scenario's.
...A president’s approval rating toward the end of his third year, therefore, has been a decent (although imperfect) predictor of his chances of victory... In fact, since 1944 (when approval ratings first became reliable), there have been five cases in which the incumbent party’s president had an approval rating below 49 percent a year ahead of the election — as Obama almost certainly will, unless he finds the cure for cancer after our issue goes to print — and each time the incumbent party lost.... The correct conclusion, then, is that other factors being equal, an approval rating in the low 40s a year before the election makes a president a slight but not overwhelming underdog....
...If Obama’s approval ratings were in the low 30s or worse instead of the 40s, that would be another story. The three presidents to fit this description — Carter in 1979, George W. Bush in 2007 and Harry Truman in 1951 — saw their parties take big defeats the next year. It would also be another matter if Obama’s approval rating were closer to 50 percent. Of the six presidents to have approval ratings in that range a year ahead of the election — Nixon, Clinton, Bush the younger, Truman in 1947 and Reagan in 1983 and 1987 (with Bush the elder running as his proxy in the latter case) — all six won...
...The good news (for Obama) is that voters have short memories. If there are hopeful signs during an election year, they may be willing to forget earlier problems. Reagan, Nixon, Eisenhower and Truman all won despite recessions earlier in their terms. Moreover, voters’ evaluations of the economy are relatively forward-looking. Even if the economy is below its full productive capacity — as it was in November 1984 when the unemployment rate was 7.2 percent, and as it certainly was in 1936, when it was still around 17 percent — voters may be willing to overlook this, provided it seems headed in the right direction....
...Growth rates during an election year are a good but imperfect indicator of electoral performance. The two times that economic activity actually shrank during an election year, 1980 and 2008, the incumbent party lost badly. The two times that it grew by more than 6 percent, 1944 and 1972, it won overwhelmingly. But Eisenhower won a landslide in 1956 despite tepid 1.8 percent growth, and George W. Bush won in 2004 with only 2.9 percent. The economy grew about 5 percent in 1968, but that wasn’t enough to save Humphrey....
....The other major unknown is the identity of the Republican nominee. This year it could make an unusually large amount of difference. In recent polls against Mitt Romney, Obama’s lead is just 1 percentage point — but he leads Herman Cain by 8, Rick Perry by 11 and Michele Bachmann by 14.... In this case, though, the relative standing of the Republican opponents against Obama aligns neatly with their perceived ideology. Obama does worse against more moderate candidates like Romney — and better against staunch conservatives like Perry and Cain....
...The bigger problem for Republicans might come if they nominate a candidate further to Romney’s right, like Perry, who has an extremism score of 67 (for comparison, Romney's 'extremism' score is 49 and Cain's score is 60). The difference between Romney and Perry amounts to about 4 percentage points at the ballot booth. If conditions were otherwise very favorable (or very unfavorable) to Republicans, this wouldn’t be enough to matter: an election that Romney would win by 10 points, Perry might win by 6. But an election that Romney might win by just 2 or 3 points, Perry could easily lose....
...By combining these factors — approval ratings in the year before the election, G.D.P. growth during the election year itself and the ideology score of the opposition candidate — we can come up with a forecast of next year’s election...
If the nominee is a moderate like Romney and the economy is weak, Silver projects the GOP's probability of winning the popular vote at 85% and Obama is toast. If the nominee is more conservative like Perry or Cain and the economy is weak, Silver project's the GOP's probability of winning the popular vote to be only 59%- the Republican would still be a favorite, although Obama would only be a slight underdog here and might pull out a win based on money and dirty tricks.
If the GOP nominee is a moderate like Romney and the economy is improving in 2012, then Silver project's the GOP's probability of winning the popular vote to be only 40%- they could still pull it out if voters decide that the Republican offers more calm and secure leadership after the protests and partisanship of the Obama years, but Obama would be the favorite to hold on and keep his administration. If the nominee is a conservative like Perry or Cain in 2012 and the economy is improving, Silver thinks that the the GOP's chances of winning the Presidency are pretty poor- even after how bad things have been over the last couple years, voters belief in an improving economy and hesitation about a more extreme GOP candidate gives the GOP only a 17% probability of wining the Presidency.
Of course, these are just Silver's projections and you are free to draw your own conclusions about who to support in the upcoming election based on these sorts of projections, but for one find his analysis to be very insightful and helpful to me in trying to figure out who to support in the upcoming Republican primary election.
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